A Challenge Grad Card

Back in the days before I lived in the Blogosphere, I lived on Splitcoast. My upline told me about it as a great source for ideas for card-making, and since it's SU-centric, it was like I'd died and gone to heaven. You can look up all the SU sets by name and see a bazillion cards made by other people using the same set. GOLD! Plus, they have weekly daily challenges to keep you trying new things. No, that wasn't a typo. By "weekly daily" I mean that each day of the week is a different challenge. For example, every Tuesday is a Color Combo challenge, and every Wednesday is a Sketch challenge. They also have challenges to try new techniques and to use things in different ways. All of this is to help you get out of a rut, or just to keep learning new things.

But since I've been blogging, I have neglected SCS. I have so many blogs in my Google Reader that I have more than enough ideas to keep me going. I seem to have swapped the Blogosphere for my old friend SCS.

The past few weeks, one of my Tweeps has been doing the SCS challenges, and the other day I mentioned that I used to try and combine challenges, mostly to get them in and only have to make one card. ;-) She was intrigued by this idea, so I challenged her to combine a few challenges on one card, and I'd do the same. This card, dear readers, is the result of my efforts:

This combined the Color Combo of Barely Banana, Mellow Moss and Real Red; the Sketch; and this week's Ways To Use It challenge of using ... RIBBON! Monday's technique challenge was a one-layer card, and I decided that didn't fit with my goals, so I scrapped the idea of attempting a four-fer. ;)

I'm pretty sure I broke a ton of rules with this card. I used So Saffron instead of Barely Banana, and I introduced another color with both the blue buttons and the Kraft card base. But I was INSPIRED by all the challenges, and I think that counts for something.

As I was planning the card, I decided to try and stack some of the images on my acrylic block. One of the cool things about clear-mount stamps, whether they're red rubber or clear stamps, is you can stick more than one to your acrylic block at the same time. This saves you the step of stamping twice, plus you have a better chance of getting things straight. As we all know, in my world, this is necessary. Very necessary.

Here is what I'm talking about:

The first time I used these stamps, I stamped the grads first, then went back and stamped the sentiment. THIS time, I put both stamps on the block with the space I wanted between them and stamped once with both images. SWEET!

See:

I did manage to get the sentiment to curl up on the right, but hey, at least they are all consistently curled, so I can say I meant to do that!

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the results:

And I'd like to mention, for the record, that this SU stamp set Go, Graduate uses correct punctuation! YES! Notice the comma both in the set's name AND in the sentiment. This makes me very happy, indeed.

Gotta run to the Day Job now. Thanks for stopping by!